BAA Conference 2010
Green Cultures:
Environmental Knowledge, Climate, and Catastrophe
Amerika Haus, Karolinenplatz 3, Munich
Welcome to the annual conference of the Bavarian American Academy, in cooperation with the Rachel Carson Center this year. For a first glimpse see the overview below which will be followed by the detailed program (also available as PDF download). We are looking forward to seeing you at the conference.
Friday, 9 July 2010
9.00 Conference Opening and Panels all day
Saturday, 10 July 2010
9.00 Final Panel
11.00 Greetings, U.S. Consul General Conrad Tribble
11.15 Keynote Lecture
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Prof. Dr. Klaus Töpfer
Sustainable Development - The New Name For Peace?!
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12.00 Panel Discussion
Was können Deutschland und die USA in Sachen Umwelt voneinander lernen?
The conference will focus on environmental knowledge production in the U.S. by taking as starting points the impact of natural catastrophes and of public debates on climate change and environmental threats. Papers will address the social, political, economic, ecological, and cultural effects of natural catastrophes. At stake will be issues such as disaster management and politics, disaster as spectacle, and the popular imagination of catastrophe which point to the role of language, texts, and the media in creating and limiting knowledge about environmental issues and about the political, economic, and ethical dimensions of the human-nature relationship.
In bringing together historians and geographers, literary and cultural studies scholars, political scientists, anthropologists, and scientists from the United States and Europe, the conference will demonstrate that the human experience and imagination of environment have played a truly important role in American culture.
In the public forum that will close the conference and focus on a transatlantic perspective, we shall compare "Green Cultures" in Germany and America and we will ask ourselves what we can learn from one another.
The annual conference of the Bavarian American Academy (BAA) in 2010 is organized and sponsored by Rachel Carson Center Munich and the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie / Bavarian American Academy (BAA).
No conference fee.
Please register for participation by
Fon: +49-89-54 50 40 30
Fax: +49-89-54 50 40 35
E-Mail: info@amerika-akademie.de
Click here to get directly to the program of Friday (July 9) and Saturday (July 10) or the abstracts of the papers.
The Conference Program
Click on the name of the speaker for biographical information and the abstract of the paper.
FRIDAY, JULY 9, 2010
9.00 Welcome
Klaus Benesch, Director of the Bavarian American Academy
Christof Mauch, Director of the Rachel Carson Center
Representative of the Bavarian Ministry of Sciences, Research, and the Arts
9.45 Panel I: Natural Hazards and the Making of America
Chair: Heike Paul (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg)
Sherry Johnson (Florida International University/ Rachel Carson Center): Foreign Interest and the Cuban Earthquake of 1880: Dis-remembering Disaster in the Age of Laissez-Faire
Lawrence Culver (Utah State University / Rachel Carson Center): Manifest Disaster: Climate and the Making of America
11.15 Coffee Break
11.45 Panel II: Ambivalent Legacies: Environmental Imperialism and Notions of Progress
Chair: Klaus Benesch (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
Andrew Isenberg (Temple University, Philadelphia / Rachel Carson Center):
Buffalo Commons: The Past, Present, and the Future of an Idea
Gordon Winder (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich / Rachel Carson Center):
The Other Machine in the Garden: The Reaper, the Great West, Wilderness, and the American Mind
13.15 Lunch Break
15.00 Panel III: Understanding Disaster - Explaining Politics
Chair: Barbara Hahn (University of Würzburg)
Heike Egner (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz / Rachel Carson Center):
Natural Disasters and Cultures of Risk: A Radical Constructivist"s Perspective on Risk
Andreas Falke (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg):
Why is the U.S. a Laggard in Climate Change Policy or is it?
16.30 Coffee Break
17.00 Panel IV: Forgetting and Remembering Catastrophes
Chair: Volker Depkat (University of Regensburg)
Uwe Lübken (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich / Rachel Carson Center):
The 1937 Ohio River Flood: A Forgotten Disaster?
Craig Colten (Louisiana State University):
Forgetting the Unforgettable: Losing Social Memory and Resilience in New Orleans
18.45 BAA MEMBERES´MEETING (Members only!)
SATURDAY, JULY 10, 2010
9.00 Panel V: Environmental Knowledge and the Imagination: Literature and Film
Chair: Sylvia Mayer (University of Bayreuth)
Stacy Alaimo (University of Texas at Arlington):
Trans-corporeal Knowledges: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
Alexa Weik (University of Fribourg / Rachel Carson Center):
Facing The Day After Tomorrow: Filmed Disaster, Emotional Engagement, and Climate Risk Perception
10.30 Coffee Break
11.00 Greetings, U.S. Consul General Conrad Tribble
Awards Ceremony: 2010 BAA Dissertation Award
11.15 Keynote Address:
Klaus Töpfer (Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam / Former Under Secretary General United Nations)
Sustainable Development - The New Name For Peace?!
12.00 Podiumsdiskussion:
Was können Deutschland und die USA im Bereich Umwelt voneinander lernen?
Moderation: Jeanne Rubner (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
Albert Göttle (Bayerisches Landesamt für Umwelt)
Christof Mauch (Rachel Carson Center / Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Karsten Smid (Greenpeace Deutschland)
13.00 End of Conference
The following organizations support the conference
Bayerisch-Amerikanisches Zentrum
im Amerika Haus München e.V. |
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U.S. Consulate General, Munich |
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Abstracts & Biographical Information
Click here to download the abstract booklet in pdf-format. It will be soon available.
Panel I: Natural Hazards and the Making of America
Chair: Heike Paul (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg)
Heike Paul is Professor of North American Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg.
Sherry Johnson (Florida International University / Rachel Carson Center): Foreign Interest and the Cuban Earthquake of 1880: Dis-remembering Disaster in the Age of Laissez-Faire
Sherry Johnson is Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History at Florida International University in Miami. Her research and teaching interests include Cuba and the Caribbean, environment and climate change, natural disasters, medicine, women and gender, and social history. She has worked on 18th century smallpox epidemics in the Hispanic Caribbean, domestic violence in Cuba, 19th century Cuban intellectuals, and hurricanes and climate change in the Americas. Johnson has been a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich since the spring of 2010. Her publications include The Social Transformation of Eighteenth Century Cuba (2001) and Climate, Catastrophe, and Crisis in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (forthcoming 2010).
Abstract
In January 1880, the tectonic plates that produced the recent catastrophe in Haiti shifted along one of its many fault lines, generating an earthquake that was felt in Havana but that produced its greatest destruction in the small town of San Cristóbal. A visiting party of North American dignitaries including former US president U.S. Grant, lieutenant general Philip Sheridan, and their entourage were eyewitnesses to the earthquake, and reporters accompanying the party left sketches and newspaper articles as evidence of the catastrophe. The disaster raised questions of authority and the efficacy of governmental control. Who, if anyone, was responsible for responding to the crisis? This paper examines the earthquake of 1880 in the context of questions about the response of governments, both monarchies and republics, to crises over two centuries. Disaster mitigation programs implemented in Cuba in the late nineteenth century will be compared with and contrasted to responses in other areas of the Spanish empire and in the United States. In the case of the 1880 earthquake, a weak Spanish government combined with laissez-faire economic policies made the government response limited, at best. Troops were sent to maintain order but few efforts were taken to relieve the suffering of the victims. As a result the event left only few traces in the cultural memory. This paper argues that the silence about the earthquake was intentional so as not to scare US and Canadian investors, particularly railroad interests, from investing in the island.
Lawrence Culver (Utah State University / Rachel Carson Center): Manifest Disaster: Climate and the Making of America
Lawrence Culver is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Utah State University. He received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. His dissertation received the 2005 Rachel Carson Prize for best dissertation from the American Society for Environmental History. Culver"s first book, based on that dissertation, is The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America, forthcoming later this year from Oxford University Press. In summer and fall 2010 he is in residence as a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich to work on his second book project, Manifest Disaster: Climate and the Making of America.
Abstract
U.S. has witnessed a debate about human-caused climate change. Despite strong and growing scientific evidence, a substantial proportion of the U.S. population still does not believe that global warming is real. In fact, this debate is nothing new - Americans have been arguing about climate for centuries. Throughout their history, Americans have contested the realities of the climates and ecosystems of North America. The current debate over climate change is linked to a much longer history of how Americans have thought about climate: from the continent they imagined from early exploration and settlement, to the ideology of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, to the climatic myths that spurred development on the high Plains and in the arid Southwest in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through the perspective of environmental history, "Manifest Disaster" will help illuminate the longer and little-known history of climate and debates
Panel II: Ambivalent Legacies: Environmental Imperialism and Notions of Progress
Chair: Klaus Benesch (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
Klaus Benesch is Professor of American Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Since 2007 he is Director of the Bavarian American Academy.
Andrew Isenberg (Temple University, Philadelphia / Rachel Carson Center): Buffalo Commons: The Past, Present, and the Future of an Idea
Andrew Isenberg is an environmental historian who teaches as Professor of History at Temple University in Philadelphia, with an interest in the North American West and the encounter between Native Americans and Euroamericans. He received his Ph.D. in history at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (2000) and Mining California: An Ecological History (2005), and the editor of The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space (2006). Isenberg is currently a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center.
Abstract
In recent years, as the North American Great Plains have suffered from soil erosion and a decline in population, a collection of geographers and environmentalists have proposed that a sizable portion of the region be designated as a "Buffalo Commons" and restored to its condition before the near-extinction of the bison in the 19th century. The proposal is polarizing: environmentalists see it as one that could heal an environment that has suffered not only the near-extinction of the bison but the infamous "Dust Bowl" of the 1930s. Residents of the Great Plains, by contrast, are largely - and vociferously - opposed to what they see as a proposal by metropolitan intellectuals who have no understanding of the Great Plains environment. (Their objections curiously mirror those of Native Americans who were displaced to make way for the National Parks in the 19th century, and in more recent years "conservation refugees" in the developing world who are oftentimes displaced to create designated wilderness areas.) This paper analyzes the "Buffalo Commons" debate, it argues that the "Commons" - or any "green culture" in the Great Plains, for that matter - must take into account the twin dynamisms of history and ecology.
Gordon Winder (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich / Rachel Carson Center): The Other Machine in the Garden: The Reaper, the Great West, Wilderness, and the American Mind
Gordon Winder is a geographer with interests in the historical experiences of industrialization, urbanization, environmental transformation, and globalization. His recent research is on the ways narratives of distant disaster have changed in North American newspapers over the course of the 20th century. He gained his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, and has taught in Toronto, Auckland, and Munich. Winder is a Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, a Lecturer at the Amerika-Institut at LMU and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland"s School of Environment.
Abstract
The railroad locomotive was the monstrous machine in the American garden. Its unnatural noise, power, and speed symbolized its super-interconnecting and mobilizing power which threatened to destroy season, landscape, and community. There was, however, another machine in the American garden: the reaper. In order to outline the transformative power of this other machine, this paper investigates the work done by North American manufacturers to sell their grain and grass harvesting machines, and, especially, the rhetoric employed in company catalogues and sales brochures published between 1850 and 1910 by many American and Canadian companies. The analysis reveals that the reaper and the railroad were inextricably linked in company advertising, and that the reaper was an allied agent of Manifest Destiny: it arrived in the cars of the railway trains, then transformed the prairie and plains into fruitful farms and, in the process, expunged "the uncivilized" from the earth.
PANEL III: Understanding Disaster - Explaining Politics
Chair: Barbara Hahn (University of Würzburg )
Barbara Hahn is Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Würzburg.
Heike Egner (University of Mainz / Rachel Carson Center): Natural Disasters and Cultures of Risk. A Radical Constructivist"s Perspective on Risk
Heike Egner is a human geographer with an interest in the relationships between society, humans and the environment and in cultures of risk in modern societies. She is currently a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center and co-leading the project "Communicating Disaster" at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (ZiF) (Center of Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld). Egner studied Mass Communication, Politics, and Geography at Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz where she received her Ph.D. in geography in 2001. In her postdoctoral work and habilitation, she focused on the interplay between society, humans, and the environment, applying a systems theoretical perspective (based on Niklas Luhmann et al.). Egner taught in Mainz, Frankfurt am Main, Kassel, Vienna, Munich, and Innsbruck. She is the author of Gesellschaft, Mensch, Umwelt - beobachtet (2007), the co-editor of Umwelt als System, System als Umwelt - Systemtheorien auf dem Prüfstand (2008), and Geographische Risikoforschung. Zur Konstruktion verräumlichter Risiken und Sicherheiten (2010, forthcoming).
Abstract
At first glance, risks and catastrophes induced by natural processes, such as avalanches, floods, or earthquakes seem to be inevitable "natural" events or "acts of God," while risks or catastrophes induced by societal or technological processes or human action seem to be avoidable, or at least manageable. With closer inspection, however, natural disasters turn out to be the culmination of long-ranging processes rather than sudden events. They are closely connected to societal processes. Whether a natural phenomenon proves to be a natural disaster mainly depends on the resilience of the affected community or society. In their analysis of societal aspects of risks, Niklas Luhmann and others suggest using the terms risk vs. danger (rather than risk vs. security for instance). The two terms can be distinguished by the attribution of decision: Danger happens while risk is the result of decisions. Risk is socially constructed, and often spatially as well. It is argued in this paper that the construction of risk implies both a naturalization of risk and a depoliticization.
Andreas Falke (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): Why is the U.S. a Laggard in Climate Change Policy or is it?
Andreas Falke holds the Chair for International Studies (Anglo-American Societies) at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. His areas of specialization include trade policy, the WTO, transatlantic relations, the political and economic system in India, and domestic, foreign, trade and economic policy of the United States. In addition, Falke has been the Director of the German-American Institute (America House) in Nürnberg since 2004. He was educated at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, where he completed his dissertation in 1985 and received a post-doctoral degree (Habilitation) in 1996. Between 1983 and 2002 he was an advisor for social and economic public affairs programs and principal economic specialist at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn and Berlin.
Abstract
Among industrial countries, the U.S. clearly appears as a laggard in adopting a credible policy combating climate change. President Obama has vowed to change this situation, but faces stiff opposition by industry, right-wing media, the Republicans in Congress, and some members of his own party. The cultural, political, historical, and economic reasons for the current stalemate in climate change policy are explored in this talk, but particular reference is made to the international position of the United States in an evolving international climate change regime, which may explain much better why the U.S. is so reluctant to act.
PANEL IV: Forgetting and Remembering Catastrophes
Chair: Volker Depkat (University of Regensburg)
Volker Depkat is a trained historian and Professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg.
Uwe Lübken (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich / Rachel Carson Center): The 1937 Ohio River Flood: A Forgotten Disaster?
Uwe Lübken received his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of Cologne, where his dissertation on the National-Socialist threat to Latin America was awarded the Erhardt Imelmann Prize. He has taught American history at the University of Cologne, postwar German and European history at the Cologne School of Journalism, and environmental history at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. From 2004 to 2008, Lübken worked as a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. His main research interests include the history of natural hazards and catastrophes, historical aspects of risk and insurance, and the history of mobility. Currently, Lübken is a Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center and has just finished a manuscript on the history of flooding on the Ohio River.
Abstract
In terms of economic damage, the 1937 flood of the Ohio river was, at that time, the most devastating river flood in U.S. history, even worse than the much more famous 1927 Mississippi flood. Altogether, 196 counties in 12 states were affected, from West Virginia down to Louisiana on the Mississippi. 1.5 million people were directly subjected to the flood, 250,000 of them African-Americans. More than 500,000 were driven from their homes. The flood was extremely difficult to cope with, not only since it came very close to the probable maximum flood, but also because it affected a heavily industrialized and populated region in the midst of the Great Depression. Despite the enormous devastation caused by this flood, it is not engrained in American collective memory, unlike, for example, the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, the Mississippi flood of 1927, the Johnstown flood of 1889, or (very likely) hurricane Katrina. This presentation will portray the dimensions of the 1937 flood and it will look at the reasons for these differences in disaster memory.
Craig Colten (Louisiana State University): Forgetting the Unforgettable: Losing Social Memory and Resilience in New Orleans
Craig E. Colten is the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University. Before his return to Louisiana in 2000, he earned a Ph.D. from Syracuse University, worked for the state of Illinois, and for a private consulting firm in Washington, D.C. His research has focused on urban hazards and lead to the publication of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature before Hurricane Katrina (2005). In the wake of that storm, Colten provided timely insight about New Orleans to the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, and other international media outlets. Since 2005, he published Perilous Place, Powerful Storms: Hurricane Protection in Coastal Louisiana (2009) and serves as a Research Associate with the Community and Regional Resilience Institute based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Abstract
Following the devastating hurricane of 1965, Louisiana Governor John McKeithen declared that the state would not let such a tragedy befall the state again. Yet forty years later, a lesser storm by many measures drove into a massive structural defense system built in the interim and caused far more destruction and death. The erosion of the city"s ability to cope with an extreme event resides, in part, in the inability of institutions to maintain social memory of traditional and effective elements of resilience. Global societies face disruptions of climate change, all the while mobile populations are concentrating more and more people in susceptible coastal locations. In the face of these two trends, a resilient society must act deliberately to "archive" and perpetuate essential elements of social memory that contribute to coping and recovering from disruptions. By sustaining effective historical practices and supplementing them with new techniques, community resilience can provide a means to weather the uncertainties of a changing climate.
PANEL V: Environmental Knowledge and the Imagination: Literature and Film
Chair: Sylvia Mayer (University of Bayreuth)
Sylvia Mayer is Professor of American Studies and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bayreuth.
Stacy Alaimo (University of Texas at Arlington): Trans-corporeal Knowledges: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
Stacy Alaimo is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she co-chairs the President"s Sustainability Committee. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois. She has published widely in the fields of multicultural American literatures, American studies, critical theory, environmental humanities, green cultural studies, science studies, animal studies, and feminist theory. She has published essays on literature, film, environmental art and architecture, performance art, feminist theory and nature, environmental pedagogy, gender and climate change, and the science and culture of "queer" animals. Among her publication are Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000), Material Feminisms, edited with Susan J. Hekman (2008), and Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self (2010). Her new book project is tentatively titled Sea Creatures and the Limits of Animal Studies: Science, Aesthetics, Ethics.
Abstract
This talk proposes trans-corporeality as a model of knowing that grapples with the material interchanges between human bodies and more-than-human worlds. Trans-corporeality demands that ordinary people grapple with the scientific information necessary to not only navigate risk society but to make sense of their very selves and the material entanglements that they inhabit. The literature of environmental health and environmental justice movements, such as Susanne Antonetta"s memoir Body Toxic and Percival Everett"s novel Watershed, epitomize these trans-corporeal knowledge practices. Even as environmental health and environmental justice movements encourage ordinary people to become experts, the often abstract and removed sciences of climate change threaten to discourage public engagement in environmental knowledge making.
Alexa Weik (University of Fribourg / Rachel Carson Center): Facing The Day After Tomorrow: Filmed Disaster, Emotional Engagement, and Climate Risk Perception
Alexa Weik is an Assistante-docteure in the English Department at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and currently a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center. She worked for several years in the German film and television industry as a production manager and later dramaturge and scriptwriter before earning her Ph.D. in Literature at the University of California, San Diego in 2008 with a dissertation on cosmopolitan American literature. She has published articles on ethnic and transnational American literature, environmental justice, cosmopolitanism, eco-cosmopolitanism, and environmental film. Her research project at the Rachel Carson Center is entitled "Imagining Ecological Futures: Science, Risk and Citizenship in Narratives of Global Environmental Change."
Abstract
Understanding the implications of environmental risk requires not only knowledge and awareness, but also imagination and emotional engagement. Paul Slovic and other psychologists working in the field of risk perception have demonstrated that emotions matter at least as much as analytical thinking in both risk perception and decision making. If affect is of such central importance to both the perception of ecological risk and the making of decisions concerning such risk, an entertainment form like popular film, which not only reaches millions of people the world over but also succeeds in engaging them emotionally, certainly deserves closer attention. How, exactly, engages a blockbuster film like The Day After Tomorrow its (cross-cultural) audiences emotionally, offering them along the way a few lessons about some of the facts and dangers of climate change. That audiences across the world have learned some of these lessons as a result of watching the movie has been shown in five independently conducted studies in the U.S., Britain, Germany and Japan that compare audience opinions about climate change before and after seeing the film. The paper combines the findings of these studies with cognitive film theory and reception studies, in order to get a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of how cultural texts interact with and influence their audience"s perception of the personal and societal risks associated with global environmental change.
Keynote Address
Klaus Töpfer (Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam / Former Under Secretary General United Nations): Sustainable Development - The New Name For Peace?!
Podiumsdiskussion: Was können Deutschland und die USA im Bereich Umwelt voneinander lernen?
Besonders auf einzelstaatlicher Ebene entwickeln sich die USA im Moment vom Umweltsünder zum globalen Vordenker. Kalifornien, die Staaten im pazifischen Nordwesten und an der Ostküste, sowie global agierende Unternehmen „go green", in dem sie ihren Energieverbrauch reduzieren oder auf erneuerbare Energien umstellen. Was können Deutschland und die USA also im Bereich Umwelt voneinander lernen?
Chair: Jeanne Rubner (Süddeutsche Zeitung):
Jeanne Rubner ist Leitende Redakteurin der Süddeutschen Zeitung. Sie betreut die Forum-Seite und schreibt vor allem über außenpolitische Themen. Sie hat als Physikerin an der Technischen Universität München promoviert.
Jeanne Rubner is an editor and reporter with the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. She completed her Ph.D in physics at the Technical University of Munich.
Diskussionsteilnehmer:
Albert Göttle (Bayerisches Landesamt für Umwelt):
Albert Göttle leitet seit 2005 als Präsident das Bayerische Landesamt für Umwelt. Diese oberste Fachbehörde ist mit über 1000 Mitarbeitern zuständig für den gesamten Umweltbereich des Freistaates Bayern, von Naturschutz und Geologie bis zu Wasserwirtschaft und Strahlenschutz. Göttle trat 1978 als Bauingenieur in den Staatsdienst ein. Nach verschiedenen Positionen in der Wasserwirtschaftsverwaltung wurde er Präsident des Bayerischen Landesamtes für Wasserwirtschaft und zugleich Abteilungsleiter im Umweltministerium, wo er die bayerische Wasserwirtschaft wesentlich mitbestimmte. Göttle ist seit 1994 Honorarprofessor an der TU München und Vizepräsident der Deutschen Vereinigung für Wasserwirtschaft, Abwasser und Abfall e.V.
Albert Göttle has been President of the Bavarian Environmental Protection Agency since 2005. With more than 1,000 employees, this institution is the central agency in Bavaria for all issues relating to the environment, geology, water management, and nuclear safety. As a civil engineer Göttle joined the Bavarian Water Management administration in 1978. After holding different positions he became Head of Department for Water Management in the Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection from 2004 to 2005. Göttle was appointed to a professorship at the Technische Universität München in 1994. Since 2008 he is Vice-President of the German Association for Water, Wastewater and Waste (DWA).
Christof Mauch (Rachel Carson Center / Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München):
Christof Mauch is director of the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. He is a historian with an interest in international environmental history as well as 19th and 20th century North American and German history. He holds a Dr.phil. in literature from Tübingen University (1990) and a Dr. phil. habil. in history from the University of Cologne (1998). From 1999-2007, Mauch was director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. Before that he held positions at Tübingen University, Bonn University, Cologne University, American University, and Georgetown University. Among his publications are Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies Toward a Global Environmental History (2009, ed. with Christian Pfister), Beyond the Windshield: Landscapes and Roads in Europe and North America (2008, ed. with Thomas Zeller), and Shades of Green: Global Environmentalism in Historical Perspective (2006). He is the Chair (currently on leave) in American History and Transatlantic Relations at Ludwig-Maximilian University, and a Vice-President of the European Society for Environmental History.
Christof Mauch ist Direktor am Rachel Carson Center in München. Er ist Historiker (Dr. habil. Köln 1998) und Literaturwissenschaftler (Dr. phil. Tübingen 1990). Von 1999 bis 2007 war er Direktor des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Washington D.C. Mauch hat an den Universitäten Tübingen, Köln, Bonn, Georgetown und American University unterrichtet; er ist Chairman des im Aufbau begriffenen International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations und Vizepräsident der Europäischen Gesellschaft für Umweltgeschichte. Neuere Publikationen als Herausgeber: "Tierische Geschichte. Die Beziehung von Mensch und Tier in der Moderne" (2010, mit Dorothee Brantz), "Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies Toward a Global Environmental History" (2009, mit Christian Pfister) und "Shades of Green: Global Environmentalism in Historical Perspective" (2006).
Karsten Smid (Greenpeace Deutschland):
Karsten Smid received a degree in Environmental Engineering from the Technical University of Munich. He is a co-founder of the Science Shop in Munich. From 1990 to 2000 Smid was Coordinator of the Greenpeace mobile air monitoring station. Since 2000, he is campaign coordinator for Climate & Energy (Greenpeace Germany) and he is a Greenpeace International delegate to the international climate conferences. His work focuses on international energy and climate policy and on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of energy utility companies.
Karsten Smid absolvierte ein ingenieurwissenschaftliches Studium und Aufbaustudium der Umweltschutztechnik an der TU München. Er ist Mitbegründer des Wissenschaftsladen München. Von 1990 bis 2000 war er Koordinator der mobilen Luftmessstation von Greenpeace. Seit 2000 ist Smid Kampagnenleiter für Klima & Energie und für Greenpeace International Delegierter auf den internationalen Klimakonferenzen. Seine Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind die internationale Energie- und Klimapolitik, sowie die Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) von Energiekonzernen.